About

About Dashun

I am an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, and (by courtesy) Industrial Engineering & Management Sciences at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. I am also a core faculty at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). Prior to joining Northwestern, I was an Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University and before that, a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

I received my Ph.D. in physics in 2013 from Northeastern University, where I was a member of the Center for Complex Network Research. From 2009 to 2013, I also held an affiliation with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University as a Research Associate. I received my B.S. degree in physics from Fudan University in 2007. I am a recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator award (2016).

I lead a group of highly interdisciplinary researchers who are extremely passionate about data. Our research takes a multidisciplinary approach—combining statistical physics, computer science, and computational social science—to exploit the opportunities and promises offered by Big Data. Through the lens of new and increasingly available large-scale datasets, we hope to use and develop tools of network science to help improve the way in which we understand the interconnectedness of the social, technical, and business world around us. Our work has been applied to understand and predict social interactions, human mobility, knowledge production, and scientific impact. Our research has been published in such general audience journals as Science and PNAS, as well as top specialized venues in computer science and physics, and has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Economist, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other major global media outlets.